I love the amount of effort you've done making this project happen,
as I recently picked up an Evo 4G so my interest in a universal media tool is very high.

I feel the current setup using Subversion on Sourceforge.com doesn't allow for multiple people to make code contributions to the betterment of all users. Your current code base is a great tool for cross platform transcoding media server for web/mobile but I much rather contribute my time to the project if the number of developers can increase without creating too much work for integrating contributions to the "main" branch of Subsonic development. Would you consider making a change from Subversion to Git (on github.com) to allow a more collaborative coding effort to occur?

Very nice, this is pretty much what I was looking for... distributed version control! However, since this repo is periodically pulled from the SVN repo on sourceforge.net, is there a mechanism so if we check in a code change on our own branches Sindre can evaluate our changes and merge them into the main development trunk? I'd much rather contribute to the project as a whole rather than create one-off forks.

Hi everyone I'd like to reopen this topic thread again because as much as I love this open source project I feel the development effort Sindre is able to devote to the project doesn't match the eagerness of the community at large.

Today there is no easy process to begin extending Subsonic and sharing those changes back with the community without creating a patch/merge nightmare. The continued growth of DVCS tools like git and mercurial for open source projects has led me to renew my calls to transition this project to a similar system.

OEH: Launchpad seems like a decent place to host since it can easily sync up with the SVN repo Sindre is committing to, but what is the point of committing code that won't see the light of day in the main project? I really want to hear Sindre's take on this.

I've gone ahead and started a Subsonic project fork called Supersonic that I have pushed to Github.

I plan to automatically track Sindre's SVN trunk on the upstream branch, while providing my own changes and features on master/develop branches. As of today, to get started you would have to clone the repo and run Maven to build the project, but I plan on publishing the generated project artifacts directly to Github using their Maven plugin.

I'm really looking forward to making this more collaborative effort so we can learn and benefit from each other rather than always relying on Sindre.

Last edited by porkcharsui on Fri Feb 17, 2012 6:29 am, edited 1 time in total.

I too find it difficult to contribute to the Subsonic code base. It seems to me that there are just too many ways to report issues and provide fixes which hampers progress on the project.

First, there's the forum where users post issues in a rather unstructured fashion. This is great at times, e.g., when users announce a new GUI or client implementation. Then again, it's barely usable for bug and feature reporting as you cannot assign tasks to different people, mark issues as duplicates, and many other things that you take for granted when dealing with collaborative software engineering.

There's also Sourceforge which people use once in a while. Unfortunately, no one but Sindre seems to be in charge of managing the Sourceforge tracker: The number of closed bugs and feature requests is 2(!) which may simply be the case due to lack of management. (I suppose a lot of bugs which have been fixed in the code are not marked in the tracker accordingly.)

Finally, there's Launchpad. I am not sure why it's there, there's just a single issue reported; overall, it seems to be unused and obsolete.

In consequence, I think the Subsonic infrastructure needs some cleanup and redundancy elimination. Besides the points described there are further issues, such as having both an FAQ forum and an FAQ section in the wiki. These things just make it very hard to guarantee the kind of quality level that the project deserves.

porkcharsui wrote:I've gone ahead and started a Subsonic project fork called Supersonic that I have pushed to Github.

I plan to automatically track Sindre's SVN trunk on the upstream branch, while providing my own changes and features on master/develop branches. As of today, to get started you would have to clone the repo and run Maven to build the project, but I plan on publishing the generated project artifacts directly to Github using their Maven plugin.

I'm really looking forward to making this more collaborative effort so we can learn and benefit from each other rather than always relying on Sindre.

Seeing you forking of a branch off Subsonic into github gives me mixed feelings. It's good to be able to work with git on the Subsonic code due to, well, its apparent strengths (branching, merging, you name it). In my opinion, working with Subversion effectively in a collaborative fashion is very hard, there are just too many restrictions. Not sure how much experience Sindre has with git, I'd be fine with Mercurial or even Bazaar just as well as long as we're going DCVS.On the downside, getting to use a nice DCVS by means of having to fork is not a preferable option to me. It'll make everything even more difficult, first and foremost synchronisation of new features and bug fixes. I'd much rather see a single Subsonic project making the necessary changes to its infrastructure and workflow that will allow for a great collaborative work.

I can't tell whether Sindre would agree with opening up the project more so that people other than him can take important roles as well. All I can say is that if distributing work load among additional people is desired I'd be glad to join the party.

I completely understand your concerns as well which is why I tried to get Sindre's attention back in 2010. The LaunchPad was created by another user like myself but appears just to track the SVN. To be honest I got tired of waiting and just took things into my own hands; woo GPL.

If you want to start playing with a DVCS feel free to fork supersonic on Github. The upstream branch has been tracking all of Sindre's SVN commits since December 6, 2011 and is automatically synced daily.

My master branch is where I plan on placing my commits which will incorporate commits from Sindre. My goal is to make GPL software actually free, match Sindre major releases and add/modify features as needed.

I have been planning out my next major change: auto mixes powered by Echonest followed by an improved web UI.

Perhaps if a fork can gain some momentum Sindre would be motivated to emulate. Github would be perfect. There are several issues I'd like to work on but communicating the issues with Sindre is painful at best.